August 07, 2014

In an editorial, Yated Ne’eman argued that the haredi community had drawn too close to the IDF during the war and that the government, the IDF and secular Israelis wanted to entrap them in “spiritual terror tunnels.”

On Thursday, only the second day of the three-day humanitarian cease fire between Hamas and Israel brokered by Egypt, the haredi daily newspaper Yated Ne’eman – the largest selling haredi daily in the world and the mouthpiece of the mainstream non-hasidic Ashkenazi haredi faction headed by Rabbi Aharon Leib Steinman – lashed out at the IDF, the government and secular Israelis, the Jerusalem Post reported.

In an editorial, Yated Ne’eman argued that the haredi community had drawn too close to the IDF during the war and that the government, the IDF and secular Israelis wanted to entrap them in “spiritual terror tunnels.”

“This must ring a spiritual ‘red-alert’ warning…This confusion must not penetrate inward [to the heart of the haredim],” Yated Ne’eman warned, lashing out against alleged attempts to recruit haredi yeshiva students into the IDF during the war.

“The unceasing efforts to change us became even greater during the war. The attempt to cynically exploit the emergency situation by digging spiritual terror tunnels must be rejected and expelled,” the Yated Ne’eman editorial insisted.

“At this time when they are trying to coerce us, we must seal every crack and strengthen the weak who are more likely to be tempted,” the article read. “We must raise the walls…Contact and connection between the haredi camp and the secular is treif [non-kosher], especially at a time like this,” Yated Ne’eman warned.

Shahar Ilan, the deputy director of Hiddush, a nonprofit that promotes freedom of and from religion in Israel, noted that with the spread of the Internet and Internet-enabled cellphones, haredi rabbis could no longer control what information haredim see, and that many haredi yeshiva students know that their Zionist Orthodox and secular contemporaries are fighting and sometimes dying in Gaza to protect them from Hamas terror attacks and rocket fire.

“The haredim built huge fences to prevent the population from knowing what happens outside of it, and now the Internet allows every haredi person to know exactly what is happening. You cannot now prevent an 18- or 19-year-old haredi boy from knowing that secular or national-religious boys of his age are risking their lives for the country,” Ilan told the Jerusalem Post.

Hapeles, the paper of the non-hasidic Ashkenazi haredi rebel faction headed by Rabbi Shmuel Auerbach, had already begun publishing a series of anti-IDF article days ago, leading some haredi observers to believe Yated Ne’eman’s editorial was written because of and in response to them.

Comments

In an editorial, Yated Ne’eman argued that the haredi community had drawn too close to the IDF during the war and that the government, the IDF and secular Israelis wanted to entrap them in “spiritual terror tunnels.”

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